A lot has been made of the importance of narrative to any kind of instrumental, or wordless, music. This may hold doubly true for electronic music, which speaks in its own vocabulary and operates in its own paradigm, with its own taboos every full electronic album needs to be some grand, convoluted concept album, like...Read...

Calling to mind controversial films like Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002) or Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997) and Kids (1995), The Tribe can be construed by some as a film of senseless depravity. Over the course of two hours, it is unrelenting as it bleakly follows the lives of an isolated group of deaf-mute schoolchildren that perpetuate...Read...

In a universe consisting of four percent matter and ninety-six percent negative space, absence is the dominant substance. With the right frame of mind, a void can be an endless possibility. Disappears’ fifth album pounds that clay into a sonic metaphor. Gloom is one thing, but seeing darkness — an actual lack of light —...Read...

Modern Surf Classics, by Swami & The Blind Shake, is both authentic and imaginative in its approach while capturing the spirit of the original music and successfully recasting it for the 21st century. The combination of the propulsive and bombastic energy of Minneapolis' own psych punk combo, The Blind Shake, along with John Reis' instrumental...

“Every memory is just a loop. Returning again to places I once was, before, things are never as I remember them. Every home is also a burning house. Loop… and if one could draw this loop differently, then what? Different lengths? Four different lengths? Changes history’s courses – places, people, and events; all of them...

The Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) is back, this year with numerous can’t-miss films from all corners of the globe. The festival screenings kick off February 5, 2015, and continue through February 21 at various theaters around Portland. Over the next several weeks, check back here for in-depth reviews of those screenings — but in...

Though the haunting voice of Portland songstress Sara Jackson-Holman already lends itself well to a song bearing the title “Haunt Me”, the remix by hometown hero Natasha Kmeto transforms all of the bright notes of the piano-heavy original into atmospheric grey skies. Pair that with a number of delightful frills-and-lace wardrobe pieces — some fashioned...

Pour le Plaisir has been producing, remixing, and collaborating since as far back as 2001. Having released over one dozen records on the French dance label Moleskine, this is his first with the UK’s Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records, a recently revamped tandem tape and vinyl series who have also recently reissued on vinyl Blue...Read...

Effortlessly eternal, Jack Name’s Weird Moons harnesses the same joyous commitment to polyglot musical experimentalism of the likes of Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall. Simultaneously evoking both the creaky wonder of lo-fi bedroom recordings and the organic richness of early 1970s “big board” recording studios, such as L.A.’s Sound City, it displays a masterful...Read...